Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends Episode Twelve: Pawns of the Kingpin

Pawns of the Kingpin

First Aired: November 28th, 1981

Synopsis: Kingpin's discovered an experimental new gun the US Army has developed, and plans to steal it for himself. His ally Doctor Faustus has developed a psycho-disc which will allow him to control someone for up to twelve hours, and so the plan is to use Captain America and Iceman to steal the gun from the army base it's held at. Captain America show up at ESU the next day, and Iceman mentions that he's going to interview him for his journalism assignment. Unbeknownst to everyone, Cap gets a psycho-disc planted on him by Faustus, and he tells Iceman that he needs his help on a secret government mission, presumably because Iceman's a secret government agent. While this is going on, Spider-Man spots Kingpin's limo nearby, and follows it, but is knocked off it and nearly run over by a train before Firestar saves him. Afterwards, Spider-Man's spider-sense tingles when he's near Cap, making him suspicious.


That night, Iceman sneaks out for his secret mission with Cap, but unbeknownst to him, is followed by Spider-Man and Firestar. Captain America and Iceman are able to retrieve the new gun, but have to fight Spider-Man and Firestar after defeating a bunch of the army base personnel. Spider-Man and Firestar are defeated, but not before Spider-Man gets a spider-tracer on Cap. Shortly before Kingpin gets the gun delivered to him, Faustus betrays him and puts a psycho-disc on him. Cap delivers the gun right before the psycho-disc wears off, and is locked up alongside Iceman, but Spider-Man and Firestar show up and save them. Faustus orders Kingpin to kill the heroes, but Kingpin reveals that he was faking being controlled, having anticipated Faustus' betrayal and taken countermeasures beforehand. Kingpin holds everyone off for long enough to get onto a plane, and while everyone's fighting thugs Spider-Man chases after him. Spider-Man gets onto the plane, but is beaten up by Kingpin, who then accidentally activates the gun's self-destruct. Kingpin parachutes out of the plane, seemingly leaving Spider-Man to die in it, but Spider-Man escapes in time and catches Kingpin. In the aftermath, Iceman is unable to do his interview with Captain America, so resorts to an alternative: recording an interview between "Iceman" and Bobby Drake.


Miscellaneous Notes:

• Although the Dr. Faustus mentioned in the synopsis is a character from the comics, he looks fairly off-model here, being portrayed as a bald, elderly gentleman with a lengthy grey beard. His modus operandi in the comics generally tends to be subtler than whacking a disc on someone to control them, although mind control is definitely a trick of his.
• While Spider-Man and Firestar are following Iceman and Cap, they're briefly in a graveyard. There's a quick moment where a name is legible on one of the tombstones - Bob Foster. A quick Google search for the name gives me a link to a boxer, but I'd be surprised if that's what it was a reference to.
• As mentioned above, Kingpin anticipated Faustus betraying him and prepared for it. What countermeasures did he take? He had a strip of flesh-coloured plastic attached to the back of his neck, blocking the psycho-disc. Sure is convenient that of all the places Faustus could have stuck his disc, it just happened to be on that strip of plastic.

Review: Man, is Kingpin the villain after the Green Goblin with the most consistently well-written episodes? At the start of this episode, I was thinking, "Okay, getting Cap to steal the guns for you - not a bad idea, and it justifies why you don't just mind control the hero into revealing his identity or killing himself." So we were off to a good start already, but I didn't expect this episode to be the action ride that it ended up being. When Spider-Man's nearly run over by a train, I knew that we were in for a good time.

Seriously, this episode has some absolutely fantastic action. I was genuinely surprised by Faustus turning on the Kingpin, and then equally surprised and delighted when Kingpin turned out to have been faking all along. The fight with Kingpin and Spider-Man on the plane is absolutely brilliant - he absolutely demolishes Spider-Man, and when there's seemingly a spanner in the works of the gun being about to explode, Kingpin just laughs at Spider-Man, leaves the gun there, and parachutes out. I'm actually disappointed that Kingpin was caught after that, because honestly, after an exit like that, the guy deserves to get away.

Even aside from the action, this episode has some great writing. I thought at first that Iceman had also been hit with a psycho-disc, before realising that Cap was just being really good with his lies to get the hero to follow him. His excuse for them attacking the army base is that all of the soldiers are really enemy spies, and that Spider-Man and Firestar are androids. Let's face it - that's not that unlikely in a superhero world. The cherry on top is the ending, with Bobby interviewing himself as Iceman by speaking into a voice recorder and changing his voice depending upon whether he's asking a question or answering it. It's genuinely hilarious, and what's more, in-character for him. Overall, this episode was absolutely fantastic, probably one of the best ones of the series. Highly recommended.